Junction 2018 - Europe’s biggest hackathon

On 23-25th of
November, a global community of over 1,000 hackers gathered together in
Finland, Espoo in Junction 2018 – Europe’s biggest hackathon. What an amazing
event it was! Ericsson was one of the major partners this year with 3 Smart challenges
in their Smart Cloud track : Signaling Heroes, Threat Intelligence FTW and Saved by IoT.
SOFIE was also present at the Ericsson stand, with participants from Aalto and
Ericsson supporting hackathon teams, networking across the event and enjoying
the spectacular atmosphere.

One could see from the
different challenges and interesting discussions with various people that the
interest in blockchain and DLT is broadening from cryptocurrencies to
industrial use in different domains, and a healthy transition from hype to
“what problems can this technology actually solve” is happening. Sure, there
were blockchain-specific challenges also this year, but mostly blockchain was part
of the challenges as an alternative choice of technology in IoT and finance but
also other industry domains.

Looking at the
fundamental problem statement for SOFIE - enabling trusted controls for siloed
IoT applications to interoperate – it is safe to say that for many of the
Junction 2018 challenges SOFIE would have been relevant or spot on. Why “would
have”? Well, this year Junction came still a bit too early for SOFIE thinking
of what assets we could have provided for the hackathon teams (the first SOFIE
code is actually now available on Github!). So, for us it was a learning and
preparation exercise for the next year. Let’s start the planning towards
Junction 2019 well in advance and secure a SOFIE challenge in the event next
November!

Oh, the winners of the
Ericsson Smart Cloud track developed a Bluetooth enabled device with long
battery life deployed with drones, using mesh network for crisis communication
for the Saved by IoT challenge. Well done! Could blockchain have been part of
the solution? Perhaps not. Or…?